Cohesity is giving partners a shot in the arm as the new year begins by hiring former Nimble and NetApp sales leader Keith Macove to drive North America channel sales for the startup.

Macove joins the hyper-converged and secondary storage specialist after a three-year stint as senior director of North America channel sales at Nimble Storage. He also spent over a decade at NetApp with his last role as director of channel sales, according to his LinkedIn profile.

"[I'm] looking forward to leveraging Cohesity's attributes – a great culture, talented team members, incredible technology and tremendous market opportunity to create value for and have a positive impact on our trusted partner community," said Macove, named senior director of North America channel sales at Cohesity, in a statement on LinkedIn.

Macove, who has more than 20 years of IT sales experience, said on LinkedIn that his motto is, "One team, one goal, one success." He could not be reached for comment by press time.

Macove is just the latest of several top executives San Jose, Calif.-based Cohesity has hired over the past 12 months in an effort to increase sales and expand its channel.

In February, the privately held startup appointed Mark Parrinello as its new vice president of worldwide sales. Similar to Macove, Parrinello was also a former NetApp and Nimble executive before joining the startup last year. Cohesity also hired Kalus Seidl in December as its new vice president of sales for the EMEA region. Seidl has decades of top sales experience atf NetApp, Palo Alto Networks and Riverbed Technology.

Rob Steele, practice manager for RoundTower Technologies, a Cincinnati-based solution provider and Cohesity partner, was impressed by the hiring of Macove and the moves the company made in 2017.

"What I've seen from their feature sets, the people they're hiring, their growth – it looks like a lot of promise from them in 2018," said Steele.

The startup is hiring across the board with plans to add 200 employees by the end of 2018. To prepare for the expansion, Cohesity opened the doors of its new headquarters last month in San Jose to house its current 300 employees.

In 2017, the startup raised $90 million in a Series C funding round from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cisco Systems and others. Cohesity, which was named to CRN's 2017 Emerging Storage Vendors list, also unveiled in late 2017 that its Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition can now run on Amazon Web Services.

"When they started out they kind of had a mixed message – they weren't really backup, they weren't really hyper-converged storage. But what they're doing now is awesome from a technology, marketing and channel sales standpoint," said RoundTower Technologies' Steele. "They're kind of like the Swiss army knife for hyper-converged infrastructure right now."